Monday, July 7, 2008

At the last ScanFest, hosted by Miriam at AnceStories, we discussed several things related to promotion of our blogs. Everyone was envious of Randy's (Genea-Musings) and Craig's (Geneblogie) T-Shirts. The ones pictured here at the SCGS Jamboree.

So, I started looking around for an interesting way to publicize my blog on a T-Shirt and I've found something I really like. It's called Wordle.

Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg, a "Senior Software Engineer" at IBM Research; where he creates useful collaborative applications. Wordle is one of them.

Wordle is billed as a toy for generating “word clouds” from text you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the sourced text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. As far as I'm concerned, Wordle's application removes it from the toy arena and elevates it to a creative tool.

The Wordle Faq explains how you can use Wordles for T-shirts, posters, and anything else. (In all fairness, I have not created a T-Shirt, so I can not speak to the quality of this use. I will be doing that this week and will let you know how it turns out.)

Here is the Wordle I created for the promotion of Shades Of The Departed and footnoteMaven:

It would probably make a great bag or coffee cup!

Then I started thinking this would be a great T-Shirt idea for the Campbell Family Reunion this September, so I created another Wordle:

Then this became addictive and I created a Wordle of GeneaBlogs and placed it in the

Have you noticed that the number of posts written by the geneabloggers has gone down in the past couple of months? I have and I've wondered why. Now I know. Everybody is spending time on Facebook instead of blogging. Now you've introduced Wordle, which everyone will want to do, and I predict that the geneablogging world as we know it will soon see its own demise. Sigh. We had a good thing going for a while there... AND THEN WE ALL SUCCUMBED TO ADDICTIVE DISTRACTIONS!!! LOL!

fM, I love this Wordle thing! I think Jasia is right...the distractions are eating us alive...I do spend too much time on Facebook, but that's only because I'm still trying to figure out the point...but Wordle just looks cool!

Oh, wow! This is so totally cool! (What was I doing? Oh, yeah...RESEARCH!)I'm so glad to see that I'm not the only one who suffers from...Distractive Afflictive Disorder. Is there a support group out there?

It's a good thing I'm on vacation! I've made several and see me playing with it lots more. I have made a design to promote my garden blog when we go to Garden Walk Buffalo later this month. I'll let you know how it comes out.